


everything you love will break

by anthrop



Series: Good Intentions Deadfic Extravaganza [2]
Category: ParaNorman (2012)
Genre: Gen, alas: i am but a humble magpie atop my heap of bullshit, an idea i still low-key want to play with all these years later, psychopomp!Norman
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 18:20:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27170987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop
Summary: “Are you sure you want to do this, Norman?”“Yeah. I’m helping people.” He breathes out a little sigh of laughter. “Besides, I’m no good at regular stuff. College would just be a waste of money.”
Series: Good Intentions Deadfic Extravaganza [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1983268
Comments: 6
Kudos: 33
Collections: Good Intentions: Abandoned and Unfinished WIPs





	everything you love will break

**Author's Note:**

> Deadfic for the Good Intentions WIP Fest! ParaNorman was 100% a movie I would have gotten hyperfocused on fic-wise if I didn't already have another ghostkid in my pocket. I love the psychopomp.... AU? Headcanon? That was floating around for a while there, along with the idea of Aggie's fight scarring him in more ways than one. This lil' bit of deadfic barely touches on both, but I'm still fond of what little there is here.
> 
> Title comes from Tom McRae's ["For the Restless."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c16IRivE09w)

Norman Babcock sits on his unmade bed, carefully drawing lines across three names written in a ragged little journal. His hands have new scabs, raw and red, and a black bruise has blossomed on his face. He looks a bit like he’s been hit by a truck, which isn’t too far off the mark. Still, he’s worn-out in that satisfying, all-over soreness kind of way that means a job that needed doing has been done well.

Clicking his pen he tells the empty room, “I’ll be eighteen tomorrow.”

The empty room replies, “Are you sure you want to do this, Norman?”

“Yeah. I’m helping people.” He breathes out a little sigh of laughter. “Besides, I’m no good at regular stuff. College would just be a waste of money.”

“Your father seems to think this will be an even bigger waste.”

“I know. But he still said I could go.”

“One of the few times he’s ever been sensible. Come here, Norman.”

He scoots to the edge of his bed, drops his skinny legs off the side, and holds out his arms to hug the empty air. “I love you, Grandma,” he says.

“I love you too.”

* * *

Agatha Prenderghast was the first poltergeist Norman ever met, and the first ghost he ever helped cross over. Well, the second if you counted his mad uncle, but that man had been so eager to drop his problems into somebody else’s lap with nary an explanation, Norman can’t count him. Not really. There was still a notation in his little book of Ghosts I’ve Met for him though. A ghost was a ghost was a friend, after all.

Writing down the names, and later the lives, of each ghost Norman got to know had been Courtney’s idea. Drawing them had been Neil’s. 

“I never know what you’re talking about, Norman,” she’d said, fed up with asking who and where and how. “Can’t you, I dunno, make a list of all these people I can reference?”

“You should draw them,” Neil had said after he’d gotten fed up trying to describe every ghost in exacting detail. When he protested, saying he couldn’t draw to save his life, Neil had replied with that quiet spark of depth that still surprised him now and then, “You can learn though. And I bet they’d appreciate it. I bet a lot of them would appreciate having a way for other people to remember them after they’ve gone.”

Norman had never thought of them like that before, of the idea that the ghosts he’d grown up with might want to leave. Move on. Cross over. Go wherever ghosts go when they stop being ghosts. They’d always been here, as solid to him as trees and streets and buildings. That they could leave had never occurred to his eleven year old mind.

“Grandma, did you want to stay here?” He asked her one snowy winter day, not long after Aggie’s storm.

She had smiled, warm yet curiously bittersweet, like remembering something wonderful she’d done once a long time ago, and only once. “I stayed to keep an eye on you,” she’d replied, and that had been answer enough.

Next semester Norman signed up for an art class, and to his father’s ire, convinced his mother to pay for bonus classes three times a week at a little gallery downtown. He finds all the ghosts who ever dabbled at sketching when they had been alive and spends hours under their tutelage too. Barely twelve, and an idea—an absurd, crazy, one hundred percent Prenderghast idea—had begun to form.

Norman found every ghost in Blithe Hollow. He asked their names. He wrote down their stories. He drew their faces, the way they looked as ghosts and the way they said they’d looked when they’d been alive. And then he asked then why they were still here. 

For some, like his Grandma, they stayed for their loved ones. Others, like Mickey O’Grady with the cement shoes and entourage of fish, died violently. There weren’t many of those in a little town like this, thankfully. Well, if you didn’t count the roadkill. Norman didn’t, as even Neil’s dog had faded away, and he had loved Neil as unconditionally and completely as only dogs could. Other ghosts were pragmatic. Unfinished business, one last act of humanity they couldn’t bear to miss out on, even if they had to wait a hundred years.

Some ghosts were simply afraid of what might come next. Those were the hardest.

* * *

Norman learned quickly, when he wasn’t afraid. He was meticulous, observant, careful. Most importantly, he was earnest. Once he began to grasp the enormity of what each ghost had resigned themselves to, even if he had no way of really knowing what might come after, he wanted to help them more than anything. He remembered the weary relief on his uncle’s and Aggie’s faces when they had faded. Like they were finally letting go of something terrible. Like they were going home. He thought of all the ghosts stuck on street corners and empty rooms just in Blithe Hollow and felt dizzy, overwhelmed. Just one little town had so many ghosts. What about the county, the state, the country, the world? The weight of the task he’d set for himself was too much to bear, and he’d only just started. It might have been beyond him, if not for what Aggie had done to him.

The scar on his chest (and the smaller one on the heel of his foot) was ugly and tender for weeks after the storm. It only seemed to begin healing after the rest of his bruises and scratches had faded. The doctor said he’d most likely have the burns for the rest of his life. He hadn’t minded, was just happy when they healed up enough he didn’t have to smear smelly white cream and bandages anymore.

It was only when he tried his first—intentional—exorcism that he realized the extent of the mark Aggie had left on him.

* * *

Mr. Lee had been a kind ghost, settled in a closed-down theater in the oldest part of town. Close for renovations, it had seemed the ideal location for a test-run. Isolated, but not remote, and Mr. Lee was like everybody’s favorite uncle—discounting crazy hobo uncles, at least.

Mr. Lee had worked in the theater long before Norman was born, fell from the rafters and broke his neck on the hard plastic audience chairs. His throat was a mottled dark green, swollen and arched at a stomach-swooping angle. He was a nice ghost, a nice person, but for all his smiling and for all the hours Norman had chatted with him, he never stopped looking afraid.

Norman sat up on the stage lip, legs dangling, and pulled out his supplies. Sketchbook, colored pencils, pastels, journal, pen. Mr. Lee floated gently down to the stage, bleached transparent by the stage lights. “Ah, Norman,” Mr. Lee beamed, “Good to see you again. Are you doing homework?”

“No, Mister Lee. I’m sorry to bother you, but I wanted to ask some personal questions.” He holds up his sketchbook. “But, yeah, I’ve got homework too. I need to draw a bust from three angles. Would it be okay if I drew you?”

“Of course, of course! I haven’t had a good conversation since your uncle was still alive!”

It had gone well, carefully recreating his green smoke face as Mr. Lee recounted his life.


End file.
